


Maze of Fears

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Female Doctor Experiments [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Experiment, Finished Story, Gen, Post-regeneration, Things are not what they seem, bit of a mind screw, references to past gaslighting, to see how it felt writing a female Doctor, wrote this before Jodie Whittaker was cast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: This is the second of a few female Doctor fics I wrote before Jodie Whittaker was cast, just to see how it worked.  It picks up immediately after the cliffhanger ending to "Green Menace."  In that cliffhanger ending, Kishallon shot the time rotor to keep the TARDIS out of the hands of the Wirrn.  Now, things on the TARDIS are getting stranger and stranger—not to mention worse and worse.
Series: Female Doctor Experiments [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1243505
Comments: 16
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

The console room of the TARDIS looked like a glass ball suspended in the sky. Kishallon had never been sure if the sky was real. The inner doors led to ordinary corridors, invisible from the console room, and there was no way to get out into the sky—but it looked real enough from inside. The globe was divided in half, bottom from top, by a gleaming white floor; there was a staircase that led to the lower level. The seats around the edge of the room were also white.

When Kishallon shot the time rotor, the lurch sent her flying across the room, against the glass—hard enough that it would have broken if it were real glass. She hit head-first, and saw painful exploding sparks for a moment. It took her a moment to realize that the sky outside the console room was now pitch black.

It was never that black. Yes, it decided to be night sometimes, on an obscure schedule of its own, but there were always stars, sometimes moons, and sometimes flashes of lightning in the clouds below. Now, it had just all gone _out._

Then the Wirrn queen was at Kishallon’s side, turning her over. “Pupils the same size,” she noted. “Watch my finger. Follow it.”

“Wh—why . . . why are you checking on me?”

The queen sat back on her heels. “Because I’m going to shout at you. Quite a bit, I think. I want to be certain you’re paying attention.”

Oh. That made more sense. “It doesn’t matter,” Kishallon said. “I’m not going to let you take the universe.”

“The universe,” the queen repeated.

“The only reason the Wirrn would want the TARDIS. To spread Wirrn across everywhere. I’m not going to let it happen. I stopped you.” Kishallon sat up. “Ow.”

“You think I’m still under the influence of the Wirrn,” the queen said, as if realizing something.

Kishallon stared at her. “I know you’re the Wirrn queen. The Doctor warned me.”

“No,” the queen said slowly, “I didn’t warn you nearly enough. I tried, but I kept getting sidetracked by that horrible buzzing in my head. Kishallon—I’m the Doctor.”

“No, you’re not. The Doctor starts talking about turning into the Wirrn queen, and then a woman takes his place—“

“Oh. _Oh._ Ooh. That’s different.” The queen smoothed down her hair, checking the length of it—fairly short, and orangey. “Woman. I’ve never done that before. I’ve had more gender and less gender but I’ve never had female gender. This is going to be interesting.” A sudden wild grin, then instant seriousness. “Kishallon, all those legends about the Time Lords—they never mentioned what happens when a Time Lord dies?”

“I wasn’t completely sure they could,” Kishallon admitted, and then wondered why she was talking civilly with her enemy.

“It’s possible, but rare. Because, when a Time Lord is on the point of death, he—she—regenerates. Grows a new body.”

“No, that’s not—the legends mention regeneration, but it’s a kind of healing.”

The queen spread her hands. “No more Wirrn.”

Kishallon was starting to have the sinking, crashing feeling of a person who might have made a horrible mistake. It was not, unfortunately, unfamiliar. “How do I know?” she said.

“How do you know that I’m the Doctor?”

“The Wirrn queen would know everything that the Doctor knew. She would know everything the Doctor knew about _me._ How to talk to me, how to persuade me. How to act. I would never be able to tell if you were being nice to me because you’re _him,_ or because you know what he’d do—“

“I’m not going to be nice to you.”

“No,” Kishallon said, “of course not.”

“First, breaking a TARDIS in the wrong way could endanger the universe. If you’re going to commit sabotage, you have the moral responsibility to understand what you’re sabotaging. Second, the TARDIS is a living being, an innocent in this, and you shot her to stop _someone else._ You were the one affirming that acting right is worth acting right, even when it doesn’t work, and when it comes to it, you botch it. How disappointing.”

There was no reason, Kishallon told herself, that _how disappointing_ should hurt like—like losing her place at the university. The queen wasn’t the Doctor. She couldn’t be the Doctor.

“Oh, look,” the queen added meditatively, “no shouting after all. I go quiet when I’m furious, apparently.”

“The universe?” Kishallon said weakly.

“The universe.” The queen got up, strode back to the central console, and made the scanner extrude itself from amid the bits and bobs. Whatever she saw, it dissatisfied her, because she tapped the side of the scanner several times. “Wherever it’s got to.”

“What?”

“We’ve landed. We’ve definitely landed. The problem is, I’m not sure we’ve landed anywhere.”

“We can’t land nowhere,” Kishallon said, getting up.

“Nowhere might be better than some other places.”

“Like what?”

“Like eternity. The trackless wastes. The endless howling.” She looked at Kishallon suddenly. “Kishallon? What are you doing here?”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t you be out destroying the Grand Service? That’s what you were meant to do. I specifically planned for it.”

“You’re not the Doctor,” Kishallon said, very definitely. “The Doctor would never plan anything like that. The Grand Service is trillions of people—the Doctor would _save_ those people, not kill them—“

“Yes, but how did you get onto my TARDIS?”

Kishallon just stared at her, lost.

“All they wanted,” the queen said, in reasonable tones, “was to borrow a cup of death from next door. Why will nobody listen? It’s coming closer, the great freeze, the crystal at the end of the universe, and nobody—nobody—nobodynobodynobody—“

And then, slowly, stiffly, like a malfunctioning robot, she keeled over backwards. Out cold.

§

The sky didn’t come back.

The console room was a much more ominous place lit only by the lights on the console and the glow of the time rotor. Kishallon paced, then sat down, then paced again. She ought to do something about the Wirrn queen. She ought to do something to work out whether the woman was the Wirrn queen, or whether she had made a terrible mistake. She ought to—

Her eye fell on the electrifier.

Kishallon’s mouth was dry. Time Lords, the Doctor had said, could channel vast amounts of energy. He’d claimed to be struck by _lightning_ once—lightning, which was illegal or controlled on every world Kishallon had ever heard of. Wirrn, on the other hand, were harmed by electricity.

She could test whether the woman was the Wirrn queen or the Doctor. All she had to do was wait until the woman woke up, and shoot her with the electrifier.

Unless—what if Time Lords survived all that energy by regenerating? What if regeneration ran out, or needed time to recharge?

No. She might already have made a gargantuan mistake. She couldn’t risk another. The remarks about destroying the Grand Service, those almost proved that the woman was the Wirrn queen—but she hadn’t seemed quite in her right mind when she’d said it. There was still a possibility, however slim, that she was the Doctor. There had to be a more humane test.

“A blood test,” Kishallon said aloud, and then grimaced as her voice sounded too loud against the muted hum of the console room. The medbay would have to have some sort of blood tests. And it really didn’t matter what _kind,_ so long as she could find something labeled Time Lord. Wirrn blood would return an error.

Mind made up, she paced back across the room, walked around the unconscious woman, and went in the door at the far side of the room.

The door looked like it should have led straight out into the sky, but it didn’t. Behind it was a white corridor.

The white corridor was usually a lot better lit. Right now, it seemed to be on emergency low lighting, making it orangey. Kishallon had had enough of emergency lighting to last her a few lifetimes, but at least it wasn’t green. She turned left and went down the corridor, feeling as if it was tilting very slightly. She hoped the gravity wasn’t going to play up.

She still didn’t know how much she had damaged the TARDIS.

The main way to find rooms was by counting doors, so Kishallon counted. Three on the left, going left, and two on the right, and then the medbay on the right. By TARDIS standards, it wasn’t far.

She opened the door, and the medbay wasn’t there. Instead, there was a small room containing a single brown box.

Kishallon looked at it, feeling a slight chill. During her initial tour of the TARDIS, she had seen something like that. _And this,_ the Doctor had said, _is a box labeled Do Not Touch. Don’t touch it._ He had closed the door and moved on, and Kishallon had not, at the time, quite dared to ask for more details.

This box was identical, but the lettering on it didn’t even really look like lettering. More like lumps.

Kishallon’s translation mist was supposed to handle languages across the known universe. If it couldn’t manage this, then what did that say about where the language had come from? And if it was the same box, why could she read it _then,_ but not _now?_

And why did she distinctly remember the box being to the right of the console room, close to her bedroom?

She backed out and closed the door. She couldn’t have counted very wrong. She would just try the right-hand doors on either side of this one.

The door to the right wasn’t the medbay. It was a two long banks of emerald green, hexagonal tanks, filled with some unknown liquid and bubbling. Each one was big enough to hold a body, and Kishallon wished that particular comparison hadn’t occurred to her. There was a corridor between the tanks, presumably so people could walk along and check them, but there were no instruments or readouts on the tanks themselves.

Kishallon backed out. This wasn’t what she needed, and besides, she wasn’t a fan of green just right now.

The door to the left wasn’t the medbay either. It was a bedroom. Not Kishallon’s, but a bedroom that was almost unrecognizably antique. The bed itself seemed to be made of cloth, not sculpt fog, and was shaped like some sort of boat. There was a map on the ceiling, with boats and dragons; as Kishallon watched, one of the boats ran afoul of one of the odder-looking dragons and was forced to retreat. The mirror was a separate pane of something, not a part of the wall, and the furniture under the mirror . . . probably performed some specialized function related to clothes, but resembled no wardrobe Kishallon had ever seen. There wasn’t even a ring to step into.

“All right,” Kishallon said softly, and left the room. She would just go back to the console room and start over. That was all there was to it.

And since she wasn’t sure where she had miscounted, she would open all the left-hand doors on her way back, just in case.

§

On her way back to the console room, Kishallon found a room full of model trains. It took a moment to realize that they were supposed to be trains; she had absorbed hundreds of fictionmists about the Superstructure, always a popular era for storybuilders, but the trains in those had looked different, and hadn’t run on—whatever those specialized surfaces were. After watching two trains go into opposite ends of a tunnel and failing to emerge, she realized that they were using some facsimile of hyperspace, like proper trains—exactly how one simulated hyperspace in such a little room was beyond her, but so was most Time Lord technology.

One of the trains seemed to be leaking regular miniaturized gouts of smoke. Kishallon wondered if she should try to turn it off, but she didn’t see any switches.

The next room she came to was just darkness. She shut the door on that one quickly.

The room after that looked like a bedroom, but very badly burned. Kishallon hadn’t known that fires could break out on board the TARDIS, and made a mental note to tell the Doctor before she remembered that she didn’t even know whether the Doctor was still alive, and if he—she—was, she wasn’t _her_ Doctor. The pang hit her hard.

Next, she came to an intersection.

She knew she hadn’t crossed any intersections on the way to the medbay. There were no intersections on the way to the medbay. Kishallon could feel panic tickling at the back of her mind. It was like back with the Seekers, when the Voice had outright denied things that you knew had happened, and denied them with such a ringing voice and level gaze that you started to wonder if you were mistaken, because you were just an Indigo-grade Utility. Or like her last day at university, when Kishallon had found herself wondering if maybe she _had_ cheated somehow and just forgotten about it. _She hadn’t passed an intersection._ Except, apparently, she had . . .

The next door led to the top floor of the library, the part where all the paper planes swarmed and perched on the chandelier and harassed anyone who came too close to the railing. Kishallon knew that the library was to the right of the console room. It took her a long moment of thought to work out how far to the right of the console room, and on which side of the hallway—put it down to how disoriented she was, she decided. Still, at least this gave her a familiar landmark. She could get back to her room, and from there to the console room. Easy.

Only, there was another intersection back where her room should be, this one a six-way junction with a lift shaft.

Kishallon stepped out onto the air cushion, and it wasn’t there. She pitched forward and plummeted.

She had just enough time to think that she couldn’t survive a fall like this, that for all she knew the shaft went down forever and she would die of thirst before she hit bottom—when she realized she was falling with dreamlike slowness. It was simplicity itself to reach out, and catch a lip of floor as she went past, and pull herself up onto it.

Now she was really lost, and with no idea of what was going on, either. Kishallon walked forward helplessly, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do, and tried the first door that she came to, and found the console room.

The sky still wasn’t there. It was dark, a dark glass globe of a room lit only by the console lights, and Kishallon was momentarily frightened to go into it. Especially since the woman wasn’t lying on the ground anymore.

She edged into the room, moving around the margins. The electrifier was still on the ground, and that was good—she thought that was good—she still didn’t want to use the electrifier to test the woman, but maybe she had no choice—

“Why didn’t you shoot me when you had the chance?”

The woman had been behind the console. Kishallon jumped as she spoke, then backed away. There was something profoundly creepy about all of this, and she still didn’t know why the TARDIS rooms had acted the way they did. Could the woman switch them around from the console? If so, why allow Kishallon back here at all?

“I don’t know,” she said. “You look like a person.” She couldn’t really be the Doctor. The Doctor had never sent this kind of a chill down Kishallon’s spine.

Kishallon had made another mistake.

“I look like a person,” the woman repeated mockingly. “Splendid. It doesn’t matter what a monster is, it doesn’t matter what it’s done, just so long as it looks like a person.”

“I didn’t know if I would hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt you if—“ She wasn’t just backing away from the woman, she was backing away from the _electrifier._ Yet another mistake, because now the woman was between her and it.

“Didn’t want to hurt me. How lovely it would be—for you—if I shared the same scruples.” And then the woman’s eyes turned green, and her skin turned green, and all of her was turning green and insectile and her clicking voice said, _“Congratulations, girl. You’ve given the TARDIS to the Wirrn.”_

She was between Kishallon and the electrifier.

She was between Kishallon and the inner door.

Knowing that she was betraying everything, knowing that she should stand and fight, Kishallon whirled and ran for the outer doors.

She wrenched them open, dove through, willing to face whatever “landed on nothing” meant—and found herself in the console room.


	2. Chapter 2

This time, the console room had sky. A peachy-gold sky with fluffy clouds underneath and wispy clouds overhead, the kind it made when it was simulating sunset.

Kishallon could have almost sobbed with happiness to see it like that, or maybe that was the emotional whiplash. From the dark console room with the Wirrn to the proper one with—with the Doctor?

The Doctor, the _real_ Doctor, _her_ Doctor, was standing beside the console watching her.

Kishallon spun around, locked the doors, and then turned back. “There’s a Wirrn,” she panted. “A Wirrn queen. She’s pretending to be you. I don’t know what’s going on—“

“But at first, you almost believed her.”

“She said,” Kishallon said, “that you had regenerated, that it was a sort of change, not just a sort of healing. I saw her appear where you were—“ She stopped. “How did you get here?”

“How I got here is immaterial.”

Kishallon swallowed. “No,” she said, “I saw you. I saw you half-eaten by the Wirrn, and then I saw you—I saw you go up like a firework. So—given how strange everything is being, I think I need to know—“

“Did I give you permission to speak?”

It was said quietly. Kishallon rocked back as if she had been slapped.

“Kishallon the disappointment,” the Doctor said. “Kishallon, who knows the right thing to do, but is too weak to do it. Kishallon the passive. Kishallon the timorous. Kishallon the waste.”

Kishallon opened her mouth, then closed it again. _Permission to speak._ Theoretically, those rules didn’t apply to someone who had left the Grand Service. In practice—in practice, everyone should probably ask permission before addressing a Time Lord.

Or was that the sort of attitude the Doctor was scolding her for? “I—“

_“Silence.”_ Kishallon had never heard the Doctor use that tone of voice, and it shut her mouth as if she were a puppet. “Weak-minded enough to join a cult,” the Doctor went on, “a cult led by a homicidal madwoman, and you stayed despite the gruesome deaths of several of your colleagues. It took the threat of murder to get you to leave, and even then, you weren’t certain, were you? Even when you were traveling across Tartarus to warn the science base, part of you wanted to go back.” His voice contained an ocean of scorn. “And before that, you were expelled from university for inadequacy, because nobody could believe a competent assignment came from something as clearly lacking as you. Were you telling me the truth about that, I wonder? _Did_ you cheat?”

“No! I didn’t!”

The Doctor smiled mockingly. “Are you sure?”

“I—“ When everyone but Kishallon knew something was true, who was likely to be in the wrong?

The Doctor would have just shrugged and said, _Everyone else. Have the courage of your convictions, Kishallon._

The Doctor wouldn’t be talking like this.

“Of course I would. You didn’t think I would put up with you forever, did you? I’ll admit I had my hopes. I thought I could mold you into something useful. But you were discarded for a reason. You’ve always been like this.”

“The Doctor,” Kishallon said, “wouldn’t read my mind without permission. I don’t know who you are, but you—“ Out the door was the other console room, the black, broken one with the Wirrn in it.

In here was a lie. She hoped it was a lie. Tickling at the back of her mind, there had always been the fear that the Doctor would say things like this, but the Doctor had burned. There was no way he could be here.

Running through the far door, deeper into the TARDIS, might just put Kishallon deeper into the lie. But she couldn’t flee back to the Wirrn, and she didn’t want to stay here with this false Doctor, because it sounded just like the real Doctor and in a moment, she’d be believing it—

She dodged around the console, heard the Doctor say, _“You stay here and listen to me when I’m—“_ And then she was through the door into the corridor. Again.

§

The corridors seemed to be sprouting more intersections. And it might just be Kishallon’s imagination, but she thought they were getting dimmer.

She opened doors at random, encountering entirely random things. The first door had another door behind it, slightly smaller. The next, a small piece of treeless landscape hanging in white nothingness. The third had something that Kishallon thought might be some sort of eating establishment, empty, with blackness outside the large windows. For an instant, Kishallon thought there was someone behind the counter, but another glance showed nothing there.

She had to focus. She had to pull herself together and consider what she was even looking for.

The Wirrn queen had shown herself. She was still in the console room, presumably trying to fix whatever Kishallon had done to the TARDIS. It was Kishallon’s duty to find a way to stop her from taking the universe. She needed a weapon.

The only weapon she had—the electrifier—was back in the console room with the Wirrn queen. And she would have disabled it by now.

Unless—maybe Kishallon just needed the queen to chase her into the TARDIS. With the rooms the way they were, the odds of finding the console room again . . .

Kishallon’s own odds of finding the console room again were miniscule, and that was if she could tell the real console room from a phantasm. She opened a door, and found the garden—only it was blasted and dead, the trees leafless and charred. It looked as if there had been a massive fire. “No,” Kishallon said under her breath, “no, don’t be—“ She loved the TARDIS garden. She didn’t want to see it like this. What about all the birds that lived in the garden, most of them bearing old injuries that made them hop rather than fly—rescued from cats and other animals, the Doctor had said, although _cats_ in Kishallon’s time were a civilized species—

She shut the door and hoped it would go away. Then, acting on impulse, she opened the door again to see if it had changed.

It had, but only in that the trees had crumbled, as if it had been years since she first opened the door. Only the rocks were still there, outlining empty flower beds. The gazebo was gone. The pond was dried up.

She had done this to the TARDIS.

In light of that, her half-formed plan—to make the queen chase her endlessly through the shifting corridors—seemed almost an appropriate punishment for Kishallon herself. What she had done was wrong, an attack on an innocent being. She _should_ have shot at the Wirrn queen herself. She wanted to blame it on Grand Service conditioning, the early mists that were supposed to make it impossible for a Utility to go violent—but maybe it was deeper than that. Maybe she was deficient.

_Kishallon the passive. Kishallon the timorous. Kishallon the waste._ Kishallon was almost sure that the Doctor who had said that was some sort of lie, but that didn’t mean he was wrong.

Kishallon found another burned bedroom. A scrap of pink cloth from the bed was the only non-charred thing she could see.

Was it her imagination, or were the ruined parts of the TARDIS getting more numerous?

The corridors were starting to look damaged. Battle scars, maybe even the marks of blaster bolts. A roundel smashed.

She had been walking for kilometers by this time. She wanted to sit down and rest. But she had to find the console room.

Had to find the console room.

Had to.

She opened what felt like her millionth door, expecting another dark room or burned bedroom, and found it. Only now it was ruined too, the time rotor cracked, the controls smashed and fallen to the floor. Only a few lights were left, and they were all mauve or orange. Without the sky for light, it was nearly dark in here, but Kishallon could see that much, and she could smell the lingering scent of burning.

“Proud of yourself?” the Doctor said quietly from beside the console.

“You aren’t real,” Kishallon said shakily. “I saw you burn.”

“You think a Utility has any idea what a Time Lord is capable of? You think I’m mortal, like you? Comparing me to yourself, even in your mind—that may be one of the most insulting things you’ve ever done. And believe me, I have a list.”

“I don’t mean to be insulting,” Kishallon said. She never meant to be insulting.

“People are insulted by you,” the Doctor said, “because you are an insult. It’s your essence. You can’t get away from that by not _meaning_ it. But all that pales compared to what you did here.”

“I had to stop the Wirrn queen,” Kishallon said helplessly.

“You killed a TARDIS.”

“She’s not dead!”

“She will be. Look at the decay.” He put a finger to a switch. The switch snapped off, crumbled to the floor. “A bright and shining creature, unfettered in time and space, a thing of beauty and wonderment—worth infinitely more than you. And you attack her, hurt her, and destroy her.”

“I—“ What use was _I didn’t mean to?_ Especially since she had. She had meant to deny the use of the TARDIS to the Wirrn queen, and she hadn’t even thought about what that would mean.

“You don’t deserve to survive until her final death,” the Doctor said.

No, she probably didn’t. But— “The Doctor wouldn’t—“

“The Doctor,” the Doctor said, “has been looking forward to this for a long time.”

He picked something up off the floor. In the darkness, Kishallon could barely make it out, but she knew it was the electrifier.

She started to back away. The door opened behind her.

_“Don’t. Move.”_ And there might have been some slight telepathic command in that, because Kishallon’s feet rooted to the spot. “For once in your life,” the Doctor said, “for once in your mediocre existence, stand and take some small fraction of what you deserve—“

He twisted the switch.

At the same moment, someone pushed Kishallon, hard. She went sprawling to the side, completely startled, and twisted around to see who or what had shoved her.

It was the Wirrn queen’s human form.

Only she couldn’t be the Wirrn queen. Because the Doctor was shooting her with the electrifier, and she wasn’t falling. She stood with her right arm extended in a warding gesture, electricity wreathing around it, playing over her body, crackling through her hair and making it stand on end. Her teeth were gritted in obvious pain, but she wasn’t falling.

Slowly, fighting for each step, she walked forward.

The Doctor kept firing, twisting the trigger further as if he could strangle more electricity out of the device. The woman moved towards him, step by step.

Then she was in front of him, and put one finger against the emitter of the electrifier, the part that looked like a lamp.

There was a blinding flash.

In lurid, multi-color after-images, Kishallon thought she could see lightning surging back up the woman’s arm, as if she had absorbed everything that was thrown at her and was returning it in one catastrophic burst of power. She thought she saw the hostile Doctor, not burning, but dissolving in the light like an icicle in the sun. But she wasn’t sure of anything but the flash.

Kishallon blinked frantically.

The woman was standing in front of Kishallon. All Kishallon could see right now was her dark outline, but the image of the woman fighting the lightning for her was etched into Kishallon’s mind. “But—you were a Wirrn. I saw you . . .” A phantasm. Of course. It hadn’t come through the door after her. None of the phantasms had come through doors. “Lauded Centra,” Kishallon said, “you’re the Doctor.”

“I did try to tell you,” the Doctor said.

Kishallon put her face in her hands.

“No. Stop that.” The Doctor crouched down next to her. “I don’t need Kishallon the miserable, I need Kishallon the indomitable.”

“I’ve never been indomitable,” Kishallon said, not moving her hands.

“You do a good imitation when lives are on the line, and believe me, our lives are on the line right now. Get up.” The Doctor stood up herself, and crossed to the console. She moved, Kishallon thought, like she was brimming over with energy, almost exploding with it—not the attitude Kishallon would have expected from someone whose TARDIS was dying. She pulled a panel off the console, one so ancient and rusted it disintegrated in her hands. “No telepathic circuits,” she said. “We need to keep moving.”

Kishallon hadn’t got off the ground. “What’s the point?”

“Pardon?”

“I killed the TARDIS.” She couldn’t look at the Doctor. “Murdered her because I thought you were the Wirrn queen. Killed her for _nothing._ There’s no way out—that door just leads to more TARDIS now. It’s breaking down around us, and that’s why the rooms are all mixed up. That’s also why I keep seeing him—you—it isn’t him at all. It’s the TARDIS. The TARDIS wants to kill me. The TARDIS wants to make sure I get what I deserve.” She looked down. “You should have let her. She has the right.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “No, and no. Yes, no, no, yes, no, no, absolutely not, and no. I think that’s the lot of them.”

“Sorry, what?”

“You can’t kill a TARDIS with electricity.”

“But—“

“Stun, yes. Knock unconscious, even. Which is a problem for us, because TARDISes aren’t meant to be unconscious. They don’t have our natural defenses against sleep-walking, or sleep-talking, or hallucinating so loudly that it goes solid. And that isn’t even our biggest problem.”

Kishallon felt hope rise in her heart. If she hadn’t killed the TARDIS, if this fiasco was fixable— “What’s our biggest problem?”  
“I can’t tell you.”

“I understand,” Kishallon said, looking down again.

“No, you don’t. Come on, Kishallon.”

“Why would you want me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”  
“Because all of this is my fault!”

“If you like. What are you going to do about it?”

“I—“ Kishallon stopped herself and stood up. “Where are we going?”

“To the real console room, or an iteration of it—a console room with active telepathic circuits. We need to send a wakeup call.”


	3. Chapter 3

The corridors outside the ruined control room weren’t ruined anymore. They were white again. But everything else was getting worse.

For every burned bedroom they came to, there was a burned body. Several of the bodies were Kishallon. None of them looked like they had died painlessly. Some of them were still moving weakly. One of them got up and screamed, and was rushing them when the Doctor hastily closed the door in its face. Kishallon could hear it slamming into the door, over and over, but the TARDIS’s figments didn’t go through doors—that seemed to be a constant, even if they beat on them.

“This is what the TARDIS dreams about?” Kishallon said, mouth dry.

“In part.” The Doctor didn’t elaborate.

After that, some of the doors had something pounding on them from the inside, something strong and angry. Kishallon and the Doctor avoided those doors.

It wasn’t all nightmarish. At one point, they found an enormous empty room with a pair of boots in it, and the Doctor casually announced, “Oh, my boot cupboard. I’d forgotten about that.” And the next room was the wardrobe room.

Kishallon was ready to close the door and move on when the Doctor said, “Just a moment,” and moved inside.

“What? What is it?”

“I need a new look. I can’t save the universe looking like a tatty professor. I need style. Charm. Tails. I need . . . panache.”

“Does it have to be right _now,_ though?” Kishallon said. And then, after a hesitation, “He saved the universe looking like a tatty professor.”

The Doctor turned around. “‘He’ is me, Kishallon.”

“I know that, but—how much of you is him? I mean, you said you were a _woman_ now. That’s not the sort of thing most people change.” Of course, phasics changed, but they were more a gender in themselves . . . maybe the Doctor was a different sort of phasic? Maybe all Time Lords were?

“I’m a Time Lord,” the Doctor said, echoing Kishallon’s thought. “I’m not most people.”

“And—you’re different now.” More intense, less easygoing. Perhaps less willing to put up with Kishallon? She wasn’t sure. “You talked about destroying the Grand Service. The Service is trillions of people—millions of habitats. It’s a species as much as a professional organization. The Doctor wouldn’t kill—“

“I didn’t say _kill,”_ the Doctor said, “I said _destroy._ Preferably by giving you a trillion E and seeing what you would do with it. I’ve always liked to specialize in outside context problems and leave the reforms to the locals, but I’m not above throwing my weight behind the locals I prefer. My old self planned it from the moment we met. Are you sure you knew him as well as you think?”

The Doctor had planned to make her a trillionaire? Kishallon had to admit that there were some reforms she could think of, if she had a trillion E to play around with, but—the casual assumption that she would destroy the Grand Service, rather than get rid of its abuses—

“This is my life, Kishallon. This is the shape of me. I come to the end of a chapter, and I change. Punctuated equilibrium. If you don’t—“ She stopped abruptly.

There was something moving through the rows of clothing. As Kishallon backed up, the thing squawked, _“FIND THE DOC-TOR!”_ in a mechanical voice.

_“Run!”_

They sprinted outside the wardrobe room. Behind him, Kishallon could hear the creature, whatever it was, say, _“THE DOC-TOR HAS BEEN LO-CA-TED!”_ in a rising tone, and she wondered about the mechanical voice. It hadn’t sounded quite mechanical, right then. It had a sort of metallic excitement to it.

The wardrobe door shut behind them.

And then it opened again. The Doctor said, _“Run!”_ again, with even more emphasis, and they sprinted to an intersection, took the right hand path at random.

_“THE DOC-TOR HAS BEEN LO-CA-TED! EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!”_

Kishallon felt herself go gray. “Oh, Centra, is that what I think it is?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said grimly, and pulled them into a side room without looking to see what was in it. Kishallon didn’t argue. Burned people and charred bodies would be better than—than going back and facing _that._

In fact, the room wasn’t another burned bedroom. It looked like some sort of cryogenic storage chamber, several stories high. Kishallon couldn’t see inside the cells, but there seemed to be something in them—

The Doctor, if anything, seemed even more distressed. “Kishallon. The thing I couldn’t tell you.”

“Yes?”

“If I tell you, you’ll have very little choice but to do what I ask. Which is to let me get into your head. So the question is: do you trust me?”

Kishallon opened her mouth and then hesitated. She trusted the Doctor. She thought she did. But—

“I’m the Doctor,” the Doctor said. “I may be different in the details, but I’m the same man where it counts. Woman. It gets complicated.”

“From what you say—I might never have really known the Doctor.”

“You didn’t. You don’t. You haven’t know me long enough. You’ve never seen me at my worst. Can you trust me anyway?”

The Doctor had saved Kishallon’s life. And things were getting more dangerous; could she afford _not_ to trust the Doctor? “Yes,” Kishallon said, and hoped she wasn’t lying.

“The thing I couldn’t tell you: the TARDIS’s telepathic field is still up.”

“That’s a good thing,” Kishallon said. “Isn’t it? Maybe we can contact her—“

“We can. We are. Our anxieties are bleeding into her dreams.”

“Oh,” Kishallon said.

“You’re afraid of me hating you, so the TARDIS dreams it. You’re afraid of the TARDIS falling apart, so the TARDIS dreams that. I’m afraid of you dying nastily, so Kishallon corpses pop up in half the rooms we open. Also Daleks, Cybermen,” she gestured to the cryogenic cells on the walls, “enemies that aren’t confined to individual rooms, and probably Weeping Angels and Wirrn, if I keep thinking. This close to regeneration, I don’t have the control I need to shut it all down. It all runs into ‘Don’t think of a pink rhinoceros,’ and you know how well that goes.”

The last sentence lost Kishallon completely. “A pink rhi . . .”

“Rhinoceros. Large. Pointy. Cross. The point is, if you tell someone not to think of one, they immediately start picturing it.”

Kishallon wasn’t, but that was because she still had no idea what a rhinoceros was. “So what do we do?”

“You let me get into your head, take all your fears away, and I send you off to find a console room and telepathic circuits. I try to survive here.”

“I—wouldn’t survive the Daleks without fear.”

“You wouldn’t encounter the Daleks without fear. They’re my construct. I’ll lead them off.”

“All right,” Kishallon said, and swallowed. As the Doctor had warned, now that she knew her fears were driving this, she had very little choice. She would only start thinking of more and more, worse and worse, and the TARDIS would conjure them to life—unless she let the Doctor stop it. “All right. Do what you have to do.”

The Doctor put her hands on Kishallon’s face. “Breathe,” she commanded softly. “Just breathe.”

§

It was a lovely day for a stroll through the TARDIS.

Kishallon found a room with an ancient forest in it, and it was only the nudging in her head that stopped her from leaving the corridors to have a long walk through it. The dark green coolness of it looked inviting.

A little bit further on, she found a pure white room with walls that changed color with any noise she made. There was an instrument of some sort in the corner, and she felt like trying to see if she could get any sort of musical sound out of it, but the nudging in her head persisted. She was getting mildly annoyed with the nudging in her head. It didn’t seem to want her to stop and have fun.

There was a room full of some sort of balloon, all floating at different heights with no strings. Kishallon batted one and it floated away from her, bumping the others and setting up a chain reaction. Before long, all the balloons were in motion.

She moved on.

And then, to her happy unsurprise, she found a console room. It wasn’t _her_ console room—it was white like the TARDIS halls, not glassy like the one she was used to—but it was unmistakably a console room of some sort, and that meant it should have telepathic circuits. The nudging in her head told her they were probably underneath the console this time.

Kishallon ducked down to get the panel off, and only then realized that there was someone else in the room. The Doctor. The old Doctor, white-haired and amiable.

“Oh,” Kishallon said, and discovered that although she couldn’t feel anxious right now, she could feel loss.

“You know I’m not really here,” the Doctor said gently.

“I know. I know, but if I put my hands in the telepathic circuits, I know I’ll never see you again. And I want to. I want to talk to you. I want to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For you—dying.”

“Kishallon, with my last breath, I restored four hundred and twelve beings to humanity, or their own equivalent. I am content. You’re the one I’m worried about, if we had it in us to be worried right now.”

“Me?”

“The things you said to yourself, using my face. Right now, you know they aren’t true. But can you hold onto it?”

“I don’t know,” Kishallon said. “I can try. They’re half-true, that’s the trouble . . .”

“They’re fears, Kishallon. Nothing but fears.”

“I don’t want my fears back either,” Kishallon said. Despite the nudging, which was growing stronger, she really didn’t want to put her hands into the telepathic circuits. She didn’t want to end this, bittersweet as it was.

“I know. But out there in the TARDIS, the new me is running for her life. And you’re the only one who can do anything about it.”

The prospect of running for one’s life seemed silly to Kishallon at the moment.

“You know,” the imaginary Doctor said told her gently, “that it’s serious. Life or death, and I do mean real death, not regeneration. You’re the only one who can save her.”

“I know,” Kishallon said. And she did. She couldn’t _feel_ it, but the daze she had felt walking the TARDIS corridors was fading just a little, and she knew intellectually what was going on. Mortal peril was significant. She had to prevent it. “I’m sorry. Goodbye, Doctor. I’ll miss you.”

“Goodbye, Kishallon. Live well.“

Kishallon put her hands into the telepathic circuits, and something in her—something that seemed more like the new Doctor’s voice than her own—shouted, _Wake up! Wake up!_

There was a flash, and a disoriented, rushing sensation, and for a moment, Kishallon had no idea where she was.

Then she was in the console room. The proper console room, the glass ball, with a tentative sunrise making itself known among the clouds.

She was alone. And there were tears on her cheeks.

§

It took a while for the Doctor to make her way to the console room, long enough for Kishallon to start exercising her newly recovered capacity for worry. What if she had been shot by the Daleks? What if she had been taken by the Cybermen? What if she wasn’t dead, but lying hurt somewhere—

At last, she showed up, and Kishallon discovered the reason for the delay. She was wearing—something, she didn’t recognize the style—a dark coat with a long trailing part in the back and gleaming silvery buttons. The collar of her shirt was held closed with a pin, and Kishallon thought the gemstone on the pin might be actual moonstone. “There, you see?” the Doctor said. “Panache.”

Kishallon didn’t say anything. She missed the Doctor, but the Doctor was right here. She wasn’t sure how to work through that. It wasn’t that the Doctor was dead, but she found herself missing little things, much the same way as a death hit you in the first few weeks. His smile. The sound of his voice.

On the other hand, Kishallon had a new friend to get to know. Or to know all over again.

This was natural for Time Lords. So the only thing to do was to accept it and understand it. That’s what you did, for friends.

“Is it all back?” Kishallon said. “The garden, all those rooms—are they still burnt, or back to normal?”

“Back to normal. It was only ever a dream, after all.”

“And you’re all right?” She looked un-injured, but Kishallon might not be able to tell—not with a species as odd as the Time Lords. Who knew what they had _besides_ regeneration.

“Better than all right. Brilliant! Fizzing with ideas, overflowing with places to go and things to be.” The Doctor moved to the console. “We seem to be back where we started. Platform Seventeen. Boring. Done that. How about something from the dawn of time? You used to specialize in media recovery, Kishallon—ever seen a movie?”

**Author's Note:**

> There are some references here to stories I never wrote, such as Kishallon's origin (being expelled from university in a clear act of prejudice, joining a cult, and then joining up with the Doctor to stop said cult) and a story that I had only planned in broad strokes about an anti-entropic universe needing to borrow some entropic matter to save itself from the opposite of heat death. Unfortunately, both of them were more concept than plot, so I never really got anywhere with them. The only important thing to remember, really, is that Kishallon has spent most of her life in an inferior position and has endured a lot of gaslighting. Which is making the situation worse, in several different ways.


End file.
